


Dissolution

by machka



Series: Anodyne [1]
Category: Real Person Fiction, Tulsa Gangstas
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-02-06
Updated: 2009-02-06
Packaged: 2017-10-20 01:52:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/207532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/machka/pseuds/machka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It started small, as things often do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dissolution

**Author's Note:**

> This is as good a summary of the _Anodyne_ series as you'll find. I could never figure out a way to work this up into an actual full length fic, though, so I've been sitting on this since last September.
> 
> From a young teen-aged David's POV.
> 
> Disclaimer: The following is a work of fiction. The events described therein are not intended to represent actual events. No libel or defamation is intended in posting said fictitious work.
> 
> In other words, it's not real, because I made it all up.

It started small, as things often do.

You start drinking for all the usual, clichéd reasons.

You can see that oh-so-clearly now... But then?

Then, you were all of fifteen years old; gawky, awkward, alone...and completely out of your element.

...You're spending the summer at your father's house, so far away from your friends, and finding it strangely difficult to make new ones. They already know you as the theater geek with an incongruous letter in baseball, a singer planning your own rock band who also competes in duo interpretation - a foot in so many worlds, and so precariously off-balance...

Quite frankly, you're an oddity, a shifted paradigm that doesn't fit their world view...and your small-town ways are no match for their comparative urbanity. The culture shock is intense.

You spend your first few weeks there feeling left out, invisible...and then you meet this guy -- Adam -- who's the older half-brother you'd never before met. He's already in college, but he takes you under his wing, and he's got so much relative sophistication and ease with himself that you find yourself idolizing him immediately, even as you're adjusting to this new reality, to the concept that you're no longer the oldest, that you finally have someone you can look up to...

And eventually your step-siblings and your cousins and their friends begin to warm up to you, and you start to feel like you might actually be all right.

Until the day when Adam drops by the house, and the bottom drops out of your secure little world.

Cancer.

It's not a word you're used to. It's not one that rolls easily off your tongue.

It is, in fact, the filthiest word you've ever heard in your life.

He's got a brain tumor, and he may very well die.

The thought completely terrifies you.

Your local best friend is the first person you tell, and when he offers you a beer, to help you relax... Well, you just don't know how to say 'no'.

And so you huddle with him in his bedroom, late into the night, sitting side-by-side on the floor in the dark, leaning against his bed, listening to Nine Inch Nails and White Zombie, drinking his dad's most expensive rum and cheapest beer.

As often - as always - as has happened throughout history, alcohol serves as the universal solvent, dissolving your pain and heartache, shifting your mood, abandoning your inhibitions...

It's suddenly easier to forget, it's easier to smile, to laugh, to just be yourself...

Those are really all the reasons you need.


End file.
